Are you expecting a slow holiday season in your business? In part two of this series, I’ll show you more ways to make your downtime work for you.

I hope your holiday season is going well – whether it’s with lots of business, time with loved ones, or focusing on ways you can improve your business for next year. To that end, remember that any downtime you have this month can be well-spent by improving your marketing. In part one of this topic, I shared with you a couple of projects related to your website. Now, let’s explore ideas for creating and managing your content.

Editorialize – Previously, I’d written about creating your editorial calendar and how it can help you stay organized and productive with your information-based marketing efforts. Haven’t made time yet to create one? Now’s a great opportunity to get started and put your editorial calendar in place for the new year. Plan out your article topics, blog ideas, guest posts, seasonal or monthly themes, and any other content-related ideas that will be of value or interest to your readers and followers. Having this calendar in place makes it MUCH easier to create the content you’ll need.

Centralize – If you’ve been spending a fair amount of time using social media to market your business and you haven’t chosen a tool to help you keep all of your social media in one place, it’s more than likely that you’re using multiple websites and tools to create and monitor your posts and updates. Far better than having to visit Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and your blog is to use a tool like Postling (http://bit.ly/cls-postling-10) to manage all of your social media from one central place. Not only does this help save you time, it can also help you get a clear picture of everything that’s happening in your social media world – all from one spot.

Automate – Now that you’ve spent time making a calendar for all of your upcoming content, you’ll need a way to actually disseminate and distribute that content to the places it needs to go. Typically, you’d go to each site where your articles are posted and submit them one at a time for publication. This method works, but can be quite time-consuming for you or your virtual assistant, especially if your content is posted on more than just a few sites. An alternative to save you time is using a service like SubmitYourArticle (http://bit.ly/cls-submityourarticle), which allows you to post to many article sites and directories simultaneously. This can be a dramatic time-saver, and additionally, can increase your online exposure quite a bit as well.

Schedule – Marketing can be both “live,” where you create articles and posts that react to current conversations, trends or events, and “scheduled,” where you plan and post a chunk of content in advance. In my experience, it’s great to have both parts in your marketing mix. Using a tool like Postling (http://bit.ly/cls-postling-10), you can both schedule a portion of your content in advance – say, a month’s worth of tweets about a particular theme – as well as create on-the-fly content that is based around a conversation that’s happening on one of your social networks. Again, this way you’re managing the bulk of your content and conversations from one central spot, regardless of whether they’re live, scheduled, or both!

What are your favorite ideas for how to improve your marketing for the new year? Sound off in the comments below.

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